Spanish Women Travelers at Home and Abroad, 1850-1920: From Tierra del Fuego to the Land of the Midnight Sun by Jennifer Jenkins Wood (review)

Wood’s Spanish Women Travelers at Home and Abroad is an important book for scholars and students interested in issues of gender, modernity, Spanish identity, and travel in theory and in practice. First, Wood continues the crucial work of several contemporary scholars to extend and expand our notion of what written works are classified as literature and which writers, beyond the classic canon, are worthy of consideration. While some of the women included in her study, most notably Carmen de Burgos, Sofía Casanova, Carolina Coronado and Emilia Pardo Bazán, have received more critical attention, their travel writings are an underappreciated and barely yet considered portion of their written legacies. Secondly, Wood takes on the important work of introducing other female voices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that have received scant attention including Princess María de la Paz de Borbón, Princess María Eulalia de Borbón, and the Conceptionist Sisters, who were the first Spanish missionary nuns in Africa. Third, travel writing, often presented in an epistolary format, tends to be neglected in favor of narrative forms. Wood adeptly explains throughout her text why overlooking any of these categories is done so in error.

The introductory chapters are particularly useful in providing an orientation of the development of feminist consciousness in Spain, an explanation of the reasons and justifications for travel at this time, a definition of Spanishness as a national identity (essential for explaining her framework for deciding which female writers were included), and how the motivations of female and male travel differed. The succeeding eleven chapters are organized in chronological order by birthdate of the writer in question.

In addition to the authors listed above, the book also includes chapters dedicated to Cecilia Böhl de Faber (Fernán Caballero), Emilia Serrano (Baronesa de Wilson), Rosario de Acuña y Villanueva, and Eva Canel. Each chapter offers a brief biographical sketch that situates the motivations and purposes of the documented travel and how the resulting documentation came into the public sphere. Wood includes in her consideration of the primary texts how female writers strategized the presentation of their narrative voice in order to be accepted by publishers and readers. Among the critical contexts explained are discussions of what it meant to be a traveler as opposed to a tourist, the role of Romanticism in travel writing, and the contradictory experience of the sublime. In addition, the text provides international political context surrounding the many documented trips. Her in-depth and precise applications of travel theory to the texts in question assist the reader in viewing the extensive excerpts in context and with a critical eye. This is especially useful for prolific writers like Burgos, Coronado, and Pardo Bazán as their travel writings are linked to their better-known essay, fictional, and/or poetic texts.

Wood’s own stated goal in preparing this study is to introduce these women authors to a broader, English-speaking audience. The majority of the texts included have thus far been unavailable in translation. Each chapter includes substantial excerpts from a representation of the author’s various travel texts to give the reader a sense of each writer’s voice. Those scholars and students who come to this text from the field of Hispanic studies may be disappointed not to find the excerpts included in the original Spanish in the volume. As many of these texts are rare and somewhat challenging to access, including the original Spanish would have been a great service to those looking to immediately include more female writers in their scholarship and teaching.

While the focus of the authors in question is a Spanish, often postcolonial, view this text holds great value for those interested in Caribbean and Latin American questions of identity also. Several of the writers traveled extensively throughout...